"Much of what we call evil can often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight."

"Our belief at the beginning of a doubtful undertaking is the one thing that ensures the successful outcome of our venture."

"A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

"Moral scepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows."

"Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing."

"Our esteem for facts has not neutralized in us all religiousness. It is itself almost religious. Our scientific temper is devout."

"In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body."

"Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. The whole defence of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief."

"The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives."

"So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community and until an equivalent discipline is organized I believe that war must have its way."

"One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling."

"It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true."

"Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second."

"Belief creates the actual fact."

"If you want a quality, act as if you already had it."

"Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task."

"The exercise of prayer in those who habitually exert it must be regarded by us doctors as the most adequate and normal of all the pacifiers of the mind and calmers of the nerves."

"Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly."

"Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

"The essence of genius is to know what to overlook."

"Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action."

"A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house."

"It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all."

"In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start."

"Wisdom is seeing something in a non-habitual manner."

"Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness."

"Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind, it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile."

"Man lives by habits indeed but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement."

"Be willing to have it so. Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune."

"An idea to be suggestive must come to the individual with the force of a revelation."

"I will act as if what I do makes a difference."

"Men habitually use only a small part of the powers which they possess and which they might use under appropriate circumstances."

"Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done."

"The unrest which keeps the never-stopping clock metaphysics going is the thought that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence."

"Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules."

"It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again."

"Genius... means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way."

"Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind."

"Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude."

"Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger."

"'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories."

"No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better."

"The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths."

"The god whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals."

"Most men's friendships are too inarticulate."

"If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system."

"Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them."

"The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck."

"The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it."

"The sovereign cure for worry is prayer."